History of PLSC

While PLSC did not yet exist, the work of the founding group began in 2011 at Northwestern University as part of a local research project lead by Dr. Debra DaRosa. As part of that project an earlier version of SIMPL (called PASS) was used to provide additional feedback to trainees and to investigate the progression of autonomy in the operating room. After publishing that work several other institutions approached the group about collaborating on larger projects. It became clear that there was room for a more coordinated collaborative effort in surgical education quality improvement. In response, PLSC was founded in 2014 with the visionary support of Massachusetts General Hospital, Northwestern University, and Indiana University. Since then PLSC continues to grow and now covers thousands of trainees in specialties such as General Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Plastic Surgery, OMFS, ENT, and several procedural fellowships.

The members of PLSC share a common vision, which is to improve the quality of surgical care by improving the quality of surgeons. We work with and have been funded by many of the national surgical associations as well as some of the surgical regulatory bodies. This organization is now the pre-eminent group through which innovation and research can be systematically applied to surgical education quality improvement.